Despite saving almost 80,000 children from child labour, and now adding the world’s most famous award to his name, Kailash Satyarthi has always restlessly sought to do more.

By Ben Doherty, for theguardian.com, 

At the entrance to Kailash Satyarthi’s nondescript office is a small noticeboard, of the old fashioned type, with white plastic letters pressed into a dark felt background.

It marks the number of children he has freed from slavery. When I first met Kailash, nearly four years ago, the number was a little over 74,000.

I remember being so stunned by the figure I scribbled it at the top of my notebook, as a reminder to ask him about it. He was undemonstrative, but perhaps secretly pleased it had been noticed.

“This is what we do, this is our job every day,” he said of his organisation, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which he formed in 1980, after leaving his job as an electrical engineer.

That figure on the noticeboard is about to tick over 80,000. That’s 80,000 young lives transformed – and now the Nobel peace prize.

In almost every way, Kailash Satyarthi is an unlikely Nobel laureate.

He has a gmail address, correspondence to which he answers himself, when he can eventually find the hours in the day. He freely gives out his mobile phone number, and, again, when he has time, happily answers it to all callers. And he has maintained the same office for years, in a dusty, poorly-paved street in unfashionable Kalkaji, in south Delhi.

Read the rest of the article about this new Nobel Peace Laureate here.